Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Walking in Jakarta, one can easily find gates in front of the alley and some main roads near residential areas which locals usually call it as portal. Gates are installed by the local community, at the end of a road that permeates the alignment of the houses, in order to block the access to the road at night. Despite the material similarity, this cannot be captured as neo-liberal urban development akin to “gated communities” (Blakely and Snyder, 1995). Construction of these gates is tightly correlated with role neighborhood organization, especially its night watch practice that culturally and administratively embedded in Indonesian urban societies (Barker 1998, 1999; Kusno 2006). For this reason, it offers panorama that breaking dualism of spatial exclusiveness where gates can be found in wealthy as well as dominantly poor neighborhoods. This paper describes how gates replace “traditional” night watch in community and perform routine and spontaneous manipulation of the territory in selected localities. Furthermore, this paper argues that, nocturnal space that created by them as representation of collective derive of urban majority (Simone, 2014), to “reterritorialize space with the intent to reinforce some semblance of conventional order and regularity in the darkness” (William, 2008 p. 521). In this sense, it is not merely a security concerns but an intent to occupy the nocturnal segment of their everyday life from diurnal bustle of contemporary Jakarta, in which main streets are projected as outside of community’s normality and order that may bring unwelcome mobility inside their territories.